Web Developer

What is the best Content Management System for blogging? There are so many choices, one can easy get stuck in analysis paralysis, so I’m here to make the decision for you. In reality, it doesn’t matter that much which CMS you choose, as long as you can get on with it and start writing!

I recently decided to expand this website, Chris M. Welsh. I’m going to start posting entries with tutorials, opinions, and the latest news in web development.

My needs for the site were simple. I wanted to maintain some static pages and post updated content in the form of a blog. I considered starting a project in Django or Pylons, two web frameworks written in the Python programming language. I have a passion for coding websites from the ground up, with complete control over everything. However, my time is worth money, and I needed to treat myself just like a client and evaluate my options objectively. I wanted the site to be:

quick to deploy and customize

easy to maintain

I chose WordPress, an open-source CMS written in PHP. What else is great about WordPress besides the two things above?

great editing and publishing system

excellent theme and template community

RSS, pingback support

comment spam filtering

…and much more. It may not be as super-customizable and complex as Drupal, but I almost consider that a good thing. It’s an excellent, easy-to-use option for most people who only require basic functionality.

In the past, I’ve heard about security vulnerabilities in WordPress. Fortunately, things have pretty much stabilized over the past couple of years, but there are still protective measures you can take. I will post soon about increasing the security of your WordPress installation. The most important thing is to keep your installation up to date, and WordPress makes this very easy for you.

Comments

I agree Chris. I haven’t used Godaddy in a long time. I have been using 1and1.com for awhile. Ironically, now I am changing to hostgator soon. They are currently the most top rated host. I had no idea that they auto-renewed for Godaddy SSL certificates, I need to let some of my recent clients know that, I have referred a few to godaddy’s SSL system.

Thanks, Chris, this was helpful. The steps are a bit different as of 7/24/2011.

1. Login to GoDaddy
2. Click My Account on the top listing
3. Click “My Payment Information” on the left side nav bar
4. Click the small “View All Renewing Items” hyperlink on top of the grid of products that display on the next page
5. This brings up the page “Payment Profile” where all auto-renew items are listed
6. Click the “Auto” column header and look for any items turned “On”
7. Check the box next to any “On” items and click “Auto Renew ” at the top
8. On the right side of page, check “Disable Auto Renew” then “Save Changes”.

Before I found these instructions I went to what I thought wasthe obvious link “My Renewals” but this has NO SSL certificates listed. I assumed that they weren’t auto-renewing. Their 15 and 30 day reminder email messages make NO mention of auto-renew (unlike their domain renewals).

Suddenly we had our credit card hit. Not only do they auto-renew, they do it a month BEFORE the certificate is due to expire!!! I wouldn’t normally worry but this was a Wildcard certificate that cost $200. We had to drop it because we also found their claim of 99% compatibility to be untrue. I didn’t work on versions of Safari for the iPhone.

Definitely deceptive. I have a complaint in to them now. If they don’t resolve it I’ll have American Express reverse the charge